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A New Video Shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Arguing With a Driver Over Fares (bloomberg.com)
A new video published by Bloomberg shows Uber CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with an Uber driver over fares. It all started when one of Kalanick's "companions" appears to say that she's heard that Uber is having a hard year. Bloomberg reports: That pleasant conversation between Kalanick and his friends in the back of an Uber Black? It devolved into a heated argument over Uber's fares between the CEO and his driver, Fawzi Kamel, who then turned over a dashboard recording of the conversation to Bloomberg. Kamel, 37, has been driving for Uber since 2011 and wants to draw attention to the plight of Uber drivers. The video shows off Kalanick's pugnacious personality and short temper, which may cause some investors to question whether he has the disposition to lead a $69 billion company with a footprint that spans the globe. Uber declined to comment on the video. Here's part of the conversation:
Travis Kalanick: "So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months."
Fawzi Kamel: "It's good."
Kalanick: "You probably saw some email."
Kamel: "I saw the email [says] it starts in May. But you're raising the standards and dropping the prices."
Kalanick: "We're not dropping the prices on black."
Kamel: "But in general."
Kalanick: "In general but we have competitors. Otherwise we'd be out of business."
Kamel: "Competitors? You had the business model in your hands you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride."
You can read the transcript of the conversation here via Recode.
UPDATE 2/28/17: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has issued "a profound apology."
Travis Kalanick: "So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months."
Fawzi Kamel: "It's good."
Kalanick: "You probably saw some email."
Kamel: "I saw the email [says] it starts in May. But you're raising the standards and dropping the prices."
Kalanick: "We're not dropping the prices on black."
Kamel: "But in general."
Kalanick: "In general but we have competitors. Otherwise we'd be out of business."
Kamel: "Competitors? You had the business model in your hands you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride."
You can read the transcript of the conversation here via Recode.
UPDATE 2/28/17: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has issued "a profound apology."
Wasn't there a recent story about how Uber is doomed?
Oh right, here it is.
I thought Uber's single goal was to put all possible forms of transportation out of business and essentially become a gatekeeper that will exact a toll from people who need to travel around and be mobile.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
you never....drop the price?
The video shows off Kalanick's pugnacious personality and short temper, which may cause some investors to question whether he has the disposition to lead a $69 billion company with a footprint that spans the globe.
"Pleasant temperament" doesn't seem to be a requirement for being CEO.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The plight of uber drivers? With their compulsory employment? I got tired of working for my employer and when I met with my director who was asking for my feedback on how we could bring back employee morale, he told me that my ideas were all good and on point, but our VP would never agree... so I looked for employment elsewhere. I voluntarily severed my relationship with the company and established a new one, again under voluntary terms. There are workers in the UAE who have their passports held where they are technically indentured servants, and we've got this guy somehow bitching about his voluntary employment terms?
If you don't like it then don't drive for Uber.
An uber driver finds he's been removed as a driver and blacklisted.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The only thing he's sorry about is the fact he got CAUGHT. If there was no video, he certainly would NOT feel "ashamed", and the need to "grow up", and that driver would probably be finished. But his bitch-ass got caught, now he's sorry. What a douche.
Looks like even in his private life he can't help but break the rules and be unsafe.
I read linked article, and nothing in the transcript there stands out as wrong. You buy a $100K car to run Uber?! Take responsibility for your actions if it doesn't work out.
Yes, Uber shits on everyone. Yes, Uber isn't socially responsible company. No, in this case CEO wasn't wrong in pointing out that it was driver, and not Uber that f-up.
The video shows off Kalanick's pugnacious personality and short temper, which may cause some investors to question whether he has the disposition to lead a $69 billion company with a footprint that spans the globe.
I thought investors loved assholes, given the number of them that are (supposedly) running major companies.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
>> may cause some investors to question whether he has the disposition to lead a $69 billion company with a footprint that spans the globe.
> "Pleasant temperament" doesn't seem to be a requirement for being CEO.
I think the issue here isn't pleasant or unpleasant, but losing his cool a bit in a situation that shouldn't get a mature leader riled up. There's a time when being a dick might be the right move, when a smart person might *decide* to be aggressive. It doesn't look like he *chose* that as a tactic in this case, rather he lost his cool, he let emotions dictate his actions in an immature way. That's not the guy you want handling a billion dollar business deal - someone who will screw up a major deal because it's annoyed about some inconsequential thing. I want the opposite in a leader - John F. Kennedy very much kept his cool during the Cuban missile crisis, and possibly prevented World War 3 by being cool, calm, and collected - though not at all wimpy.
Anyway, back to "pleasant disposition". It seems to me that being pleasant isn't a strict rrequirement, but it does help. There *is* a type of effective leader who might be described as "brutally honest", "clear", "no bullshit", or "tough". MOST CEOs who are successful over the long term aren't the tough type, though. MOST are very easy to get along with, they are the type of people that inspire loyalty in the people they work with, the kinds of people board members want to work with, and make friends with all different kinds of powerful people who can make deals happen. You don't make a billion dollar deal with Ford by being a dick to the Ford people and pissing off the Ford CEO. Contrast Obama and Trump - Obama is likeable (even though I disagree with him) and became CEO of the country. This a year after he himself said it would be irresponsible for him to run for president because he had no relevant experience or qualifications - but people *liked* him. People were surprised Trump even got the R nomination. Trump is "tough", "says what he means without sugar-coating it", "asshole". That type occasionally rises to the top, but likeable is more often found on top.
It appears that the Uber CEO may understand that this is a weakness for him, that for him to continue as CEO and be successful, he needs to not be a prick in the future. Here's what he wrote on his email to all Uber employees:
Team -
By now I'm sure youâ(TM)ve seen the video where I treated an Uber driver disrespectfully. To say that I am ashamed is an extreme understatement. My job as your leader is to lead...and that starts with behaving in a way that makes us all proud. That is not what I did, and it cannot be explained away.
Itâ(TM)s clear this video is a reflection of meâ"and the criticism weâ(TM)ve received is a stark reminder that I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up. This is the first time Iâ(TM)ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it.
I want to profoundly apologize to Fawzi, as well as the driver and rider community, and to the Uber team.
the driver was angry at the one guy who can fix the problem.
The guy can't fix the problem, their business model is not sustainable. Uber is currently losing about 3 billions per year. That's 20x more money than Twitter is losing. and about half the profit Facebook is making.
Now how do you dig yourself out of a 3 billion dollar hole? Their bet is automated cars but so far it's not looking good.
lucm, indeed.
Uber is currently losing about 3 billions per year.
I could somewhat justify complaints if Uber was making record profits while screwing over small guys. Instead, they are both equally screwed and are on the same train to bankruptcy.
yikes..tell us how you really feel, you snarky bigot.
money doesn't talk... it swears - Bob Dylan
Uber's corporate philosophy is do it and if you get caught, say you're sorry... And keep doing it.
His "apology" seems as if it may be worthless
Maybe Kalanick will wake up tomorrow to a news story that all this bad PR is all a plot by Lyft to destroy Uber. Oh wait, all of the bad PR is actively being generated by those associated with Uber.
That's nice that Kalanick apologized. Now when will he raise the rates to a sensible level that provides a decent return, yet still remains competitive with standard taxi services? Going way way lower than standard taxi fares is stupid.
The driver is 100% right. Uber has set the fares so low, it is very hard to break even, much less make money. Under $3 to carry someone across town is not paying for anything. It's bullshit.
At the same time, they are onboarding hundreds of new drivers every single week in my city. So they have tons of drivers competing with tons of drivers and everybody is losing money on damn pool rides. The worst thing is these new drivers are lured in with Uber fuel cards and Uber car leases they can get, but the fact is, you have to pay Uber for all that shit first before you make a dime. So if you lease a car from them, you are in the hole for $200 or more a week, before you turn the key and burn gas and your time.
When I drove for Uber, it was very rare that I made $200 a week working 8 hours a day. The money wasn't there, once pool went live. So if I leased a car from Uber, I would owe my soul to the company store into infinity and not make a dime. My lawyer does bankruptcies and she says she sees tons of clueless Uber drivers who got into these leases promised a way to make them pay and then they find out there is NO way to make the lease payment and keep the car fueled, much less make any take home money.
As long as clueless new drivers show up with dollar signs in their eyes, Uber will be happy to put them on the roads and ensure neither the existing drivers nor the new ones make anything.
This will eventually fix the low fare issues as drivers just quit and new ones stop signing up. But then Uber will probably be entirely irrelevant anyway.
Right now, Uber still sends me messages begging me to hit the road and drive. Guarantees of $20-40 an hour for making ONE trip per given hour. All sorts of promotions promising to double my earnings if I recruit someone else to drive. Who pays for this? Investor cash. Watch it burnnnnn.
I would be tempted to drive for $20 to $40 an hour and make that one required trip, but I hate Uber so much at this point I don't give a shit. I am DONE driving for them. They can ripoff somebody else.
Sig for hire.
The sad thing is that Uber as a concept was a great idea, but it has slowly spiraled into an evil disaster of a company. It is very likely rotten from the top, and if I were a shareholder, I would kick this CEO to the curb and find someone who was both competent and fair to clean house and shape up the company. Uber has been on the wrong side of so many stories lately. I suspect that their strategy is to try and hold on and keep marketshare until they can introduce autonomous driving cars, which will net them massive profits and let them kick all those pesky "contractor" drivers to the curb.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Uber's objective now has only to be to stay in the market long enough that they can get rid of their biggest cost: drivers.
If they can keep the show running until the self driving car becomes commonplace they'll have it made. In the meantime it doesn't matter if their current drivers are making money or not, so long as there are new people willing to sign up to replace those who have become disenchanted with the system/ rate of pay.
Saying they started at 20 dollar and are now down to 3.75 is totally bullshit. 20 is a pomotion for the first hour you drive. Noone expects the promotional rate to last forever. This is not Sirius XM.
**Life is too short to be serious**
black niigger
You see, it's redundancy like this that keeps up the hateful myth that racists are dumb as fuck. Stop it!
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
To be fair to the [ignorant] racist... I've met a few white ones. ;)
> The US freaks out and want to sink ships legally sailing on international waters, bomb Cuba and a lot of other shit. ...
> The ones that could have caused WWIII was the USA leadership and military.
Absolutely, there were high-ranking leaders, military, intelligence, and civilian leaders, who very much wanted to escalate the situation. Air strikes on Cuba were favored by many of Kennedy's advisors. My understanding, both from open sources and personal conversations with my uncle, an air force colonel who was involved, is that the people who wanted to escalate the situation were stopped by President Kennedy, with the advice of his brother. Another president may well have allowed the Pentagon to escalate the situation. A particularly timid president might have allowed the missiles to stay. According to my uncle, and many people who have studied the situation, President Kennedy went against the advice of almost everyone (other than his brother) by ordering them (in no uncertain terms) not to bomb or otherwise escalate the situation. Kruschev's foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, agrees with the general consensus that Kennedy amd his ambassador also expertly manipulated Kruschev into a situation where he had to remove the missiles and couldn't demand much in return. That's agreed by both Soviet and American leaders involved (though Kruschev himself didn't admit he was outfoxed).
Uber has no differentiating factors from Lyft or Taxis besides price, and the driver is free to also or exclusively drive for Lyft. One could argue that the company should find ways to distinguish itself (electric cars? some special driver skills?) and upsell (food and beverage service?). But these things do not just happen overnight.
What!, an arrogant CEO of an arrogant corporation that enables private drivers to jeopardize their insurance to steal fares and is named after a word that indicates it is better than is arrogant to a employee who is not an employee. Say it ain't so Joe, say it ain't so...
Wow. So much anger and hate for someone, who professes to "not give a fuck"... Not just downmod, but shitpost underneath to vent it all — then spend the night with a bowl of cookies and ice-cream sobbing, how could someone be so unkind to Obama?...
So sad...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
More specifically, the US proceeded with what they had already planned before the events in Cuba - replacing Jupiter missiles in Cuba with Polaris nuclear ballistic missiles. The Politburo got rid of Kruschev soon after because despite the fact that they didn't know the Jupiters were going to be removed anyway, they still saw that the USSR got the worst of the deal.
Chief of Staff USAF General Curtis LeMay and others didn't want to make that deal - they strongly encouraged Kennedy to invade Cuba. In fact, there were several "accidents" that could have escalated the situation to full-scale war, such as dropping depth charges on a Soviet sub armed with nuclear missiles, and a U2 under LeMay's command "accidentally" flying over the Soviet Union. It's curious that while the military generals wanted war, the people under their command were accidentally doing things likely to trigger war.
If he's bankrupt why is he continuing to drive?
He's continuing to drive because he has a $97,000 loan on a limo to pay off. By bankrupt he probably meant that the driving is not paying enough to pay the debt. It's effectively indentured at that stage.
How the hell are they making a loss at all, let alone $3 billion? They are running an app. That's cheap. All the risk of buying cars and paying drivers is offloaded to the drivers themselves. Uber takes a cut of every ride regardless of whether the driver is up or down on the deal.
Sorry Travis; once an asshole, always an asshole; all the leadership training in the world isn't going to change that. You're 40 years old, how long would you have us waiting? Even brother J. was on your tail in noting that bad trees don't give good fruit. Claiming 'profound' for PR-bullshit like this when you're in that kind of mess is just another nail in the coffin. https://github.com/codr4life/v...
The bulk of it is spent on their drivers. But look there's a nice analysis of their losses here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...
lucm, indeed.
This Lexus has an eight cylinder engine and purportedly does 16 city mpg, 24 mpg on highway.
Maybe that's expected but for a pseudo minimum wage fake-job this is much. High end cars like these might depreciate so much in part because they have high running costs.
I suspect four cylinders are enough to drive people around, there are new sedans with four-cylinder turbo gasoline too.
Two years later is "soon after"? Is this some sort of pathetic debating game to you where the truth does not matter?
Also among those incidents why didn't you mention the U2 pilot who gave his life for his country when he was shot down over Cuba? That's a larger potential trigger than anything you mentioned.
> Also among those incidents why didn't you mention the U2 pilot who gave his life for his country when he was shot down over Cuba?
Sure, let's address Major Anderson. Before Major Andersen took off, the Joint Chiefs decided that if he were shot down, they wouldn't hold another meeting, they would attack immediately. You can listen to the tapes if you want, but essentially they reasoned that Cuba didn't have the capability to shoot down a U2, so if he was shot down, that would mean the Soviets decided to shoot him down, and that would be causus belli in their minds.
They didn't know that a) the Soviet orders were to fire on groups of planes (an invasion force), but to not fire on single planes and b) the Cubans had the capability to down a U2 (flying a predictable path).
Anyway, he waa shot down and as the Joint Chiefs prepared the order to attack Kennedy stopped them, saying it was possible that the Kremlin hadn't authorized the shoot-down. (Kennedy was right, we later learned).
You seem to be confusing Kennedy with the Joint Chiefs (and pretty much everyone else in the room), who would have done air strikes amd probably an amphibious assault had Kennedy not stopped them. You might find it interesting to listen to the Oval Office tapes.
Yes, yes - a history lesson I could have given myself - why bother.
The important bit - two years later is "soon after"? Why did you do that? Was it a mistake or deliberate? If it was a mistake why are you avoiding addressing that, and if it was deliberate - get a fucking life!!!!